Despite its controversial $700 million acquisition of travel software company ITA several years ago and the launch of Google’s Hotel Finder site, Google has yet to emerge as a force in online travel. That may all be about to change. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Google “is licensing hotel-booking software from Room 77 Inc.” The news […]
Google announced they’ve officially acquired Waze, the popular app based social driven mapping technology. This was expected and the rumors are Google paid $1.3 billion for the Israeli startup company. The big questions are (1) will this acquisition be allowed and if so (2) will Google allow Waze to be an independent product and brand? […]
Microsoft announced they have made major updates to the Bing Apps for Windows 8 across most of their apps including News, Finance, Weather, Sports, Maps and Travel. The video below walks you through the changes, but here are some highlights of the core changes to each section. News: You can now customize the type of […]
While it might not get off quite as easily in Europe, Google definitely “dodged a bullet” at the FTC, which recently concluded its antitrust investigation and didn’t ask the company to make any changes in the way it presents search results. That was a major disappointment to Google competitors, critics and other third party publishers, […]
How much does Google figure into the “future of search,” whose advances will largely be determined by mobile and non-traditional devices? That’s a hard question to answer. On the one hand Google is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) brand in the world, with almost unlimited resources to develop technology or buy companies […]
It might be more than foggy in San Francisco this morning, as Brett Tabke of webmasterworld.com said after I took this picture, “that was a twilight zone moment for me”. It must have been interesting feeling for him then about 10 minutes later when Mike Grehan invited him and Danny Sullivan on stage to have […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing-hoo Search Down 4 Percent In Past Year, Hitwise Says June and July haven’t been very kind months for Bing and Yahoo. What Hitwise calls “Bing-powered search” had about 28.1 percent […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google’s June-July Updates: Site Clustering, Sitelinks Changes & Focus On Page Quality It’s back. And it’s bigger than ever. I’m talking about Google’s monthly announcement of search quality/algorithm changes — an […]
Publishers and developers: are you ready for another button (or buttons I should say)? Joining the Facebook, Twitter, +1 and StumbleUpon button family are new “save to Foursquare” and “follow Foursquare” buttons. Users who click “save to Foursquare” (next to local content) will have that place added to their To-Do Lists. Publishers that have started […]
Virtually all of the famous print travel guides have online counterparts. Most are just as packed with information, photos and maps as their print versions. Most also have planning tools, community, deals and other online-specific features. Surprisingly, for sites that offer information about travel and moving around the world, many don’t have mobile versions of […]